Meghan Daum is one of the most celebrated nonfiction writers of her generation, widely recognized for the fresh, provocative approach with which she unearths hidden fault lines in the American landscape. From her well-remembered New Yorker essays about the financial demands of big-city ambition a...
Several years ago, I decided to create an ironic occurrence rather than a tragedy, a cautionary tale rather than the wretched injustice it really was. This is a neat trick, this business of utter detachment from everything less than great that goes on, this position of being perched on a cartoon ...
It was a narrative, not a viable lifestyle option. I believed the reason I gasped in delight whenever I happened upon an episode on TV was that it transported me to a rural idyll that was intriguing in theory but that I would surely hate in real life. In other words, I was never going there. I wa...
As examples of oppressive Internet cuteness go, the D.P. is in the upper stratospheric reaches. People send in photos of their puppies, accompanied by descriptions that are often in the first person, as though the dogs have composed their own dating profiles. The goal is to win a coveted “Puppy o...